Thanks to Valtam, Shonai_Dweller, Knight Otu, PatrikLundell, FantasticDorf, and anybody else that helped to answer questions this time!
The former part of reponse obviously mentions using poisons but in general by the next release, will additional 'emissions' such as poisons, blood and sweat (the last two probably situtional to the creature, dragon blood is extremely hot) have more of a purpose for existing upon the import and trading screen, given that copious amounts of honeybee poison is more useful than gremlin tears (unless gremlin tears is used in a specific way possibly related to magic)
Tangental additional question, how do you propose to harvest emissions from monsters that cannot be tamed without first encouraging players to either mod around the problem or somehow scooping reagents off the floor (as to say it spat its poison or dustcloud at you)
> Melting gnomes in gnomeblight coated swords, purposefully applied or throwing captive gnomes into gnome blight tipped trap pits. Looking foward to it.
From the second latter half of the response, does this imply that the kobold caves follow more rules on how to manage egg laying populations, and is this behaviour only doable on cave sites, or will however its implemented (eggboxes? special citizen laying beds) be applicable to all races in all sites?
Given that Kobolds lay eggs, what should happen if an adventurer steals a fertilized egg from some kobold caves? Would the egg hatch into a newborn kobold?
I haven't done anything with substance collection, and don't really have a proposal at this time for setting up harvest for untamed creatures.
I haven't done anything fancy with civilized eggs either. They aren't fertilized. There's quite a bit of work to be done there, but it's a little more annoying than pregnancy since the egg is off rolling around early.
You state that Maps, sites, entities, historical figures, artifacts, myths, etc. will be part of the myth and magic update.
Does 'sites' include more natural sites? I'm referring to an extension beyond the current mountain peaks and volcanos as to include things like stone pillars, groves or tar pits.
Yeah, magical/fantasy landforms are on the menu, with a pretty solid goal of doing at least one drastic world-level possibility for the first release. This doesn't mean there will be an extension to more mundane landforms though (e.g. regular groves or tar pits).
Just to recap, npc artifacts (in the next release) will consist of:
1) Crafts made by moody dwarves
2) Holy relics (pieces of dead priests and so on) made (blessed?) by humans
What else? Will Elves and Goblins make artifacts, or are they limited to stealing from dwarves and humans and receiving them diplomatically?
If I have a modded town dwelling civ that has no religion or moods, will they make artifacts?
Knight Otu mentioned the named ones (everybody but kobolds does that), and that might be it. Goblins get plenty of artifacts from kidnapped dwarves which then get moods. Your modded town would just get the hero-named artifacts. Of course, part of the idea of this release was to lay a groundwork for any number of magical artifacts later on, so the hope is that the situation will be quite a bit more interesting after the next step.
With the inclusion of different planes of existance, what kind of differences could planes have between worlds? For example, could we have a plane made entirely of gold filled with a single type of creature?
Also, how will these planes interact with the normal world?
This is the idea! We'd like to have several types of linkages, but we'll see what happens for the first release -- since it is an extensive rewrite, planes might not even make it, though we are currently planning on taking the plunge. Once the geometry of the game is rewritten, we should be able to attach planes in various ways -- portal tiles, portals you can walk through from one direction, plane shifts into a shadow/mirror/astral/mental plane/state, boundary transfers like wandering into a block that becomes dual with and then restricted to a "fairy" world (so you can't go back the way you came once you drift), weird other-dimensional dwarf mines (who knows how to do the interface for that...), proper underworlds... lots of possibilities, and we'll try to tackle them. The rewrite should also support cylindrical worlds, finally, since blocks would just be stitchable on the e/w edge. Doing a proper sphere is much more difficult (technically impossible with square tiles, though there are workarounds).
Will our demigod adventurers have godly parents who can grant them divine powers?
We were hoping to do this at some point, even hacking something in when we added them originally, but we aren't there yet.
When someone attacks your fort over an artifact that you did not agree to hand over. Is that a deceleration of war or is it just a battle? Can it lead to wars?
I think the way sieges are set up it would always be the start of a legitimate war.
Will kobolds have any positions and entity tokens defined as a result of these changes to caves, or will some hardcoded behavior be involved there?
I haven't added any kobold positions, and I don't think we intend to add them. I devlogged a bit after this question about the new animal and no artifact claim stuff for them, and those are the new changes.
If there are changes to animal code and the summary way animals are handled by civs, would this bring in changes to the taming & domestication system, and also properly simulate worldgenerated animal economies rather than the 'killing fields' in human towns where humans warp in world generated tame cavern creatures below them (olms etc) without any form of actual realized connection other than broad adjacency
Sort of bringing us closer to being able to buy a horse from the local market, if there's a little stable area of the market with animals roaming about and in cages within site animal stockpiles/pastures, having a peek at what the local civ has domesticated and how much ready stock they have of it to put towards a army, food or local defence.
One last question on this point, do any races have specific preferences & handling of aquatic or (moreso water bound) amphibious animals in this new scheme?
I haven't done anything with this.
As of this version, bows and crossbows are more or less useless in adventure mode, due to the long reload rate and the sheer amount of bolts needed to put a target down, unless you get a lucky hit in. Are there any plans to increase the effectiveness of ranged weapons any time soon, or give them the ability to target specific body parts?
Alternatively: most likely it is "sounds good, nothing scheduled" but being able to mod firing/reload time or at least having the action of firing and reloading split up--instead of automatically reloading while being hacked at with an axe or chewed on by a giant zombie polar bear--would help provide a reason to actually use the ranged attacks rather than throwing the ammo, not to mention the additional tactical depth coming from choosing when and where to prepare another shot. After the combat/movement speed split for melee weapons it feels like ranged weapons have been left behind somewhat, is this going to be included in the eventual combat styles and such rework or was it sitting on a pile of "wanna get to it if pile gets down this far" stuff?
There aren't any specific near-term plans, though all of that is in the combat notes. I'm just not sure when I'll get to them. Certainly before or during any complicated combat rewrite (such as combat styles). But that is also at an undetermined spot right now.
During the magic arc, will night creatures as they currently exist be touched upon in the initial release? Will we see different rules or origins for things like vampires and night trolls? If you get to magical automatons, do you think you'll do anything with constructed undead as well?
Hard to say what's going to happen in the initial release, but night creatures are part of the current myth generator and so they are subject to the changes that happen to creatures there. It's possible something will happen, but I can't commit to specifics yet.
If you raid a civ constantly, stealing their stuff and beating up their people, will that civ respect the regular siege triggers before retaliating? Or will there be a new 'annoyed enough to declare war' trigger now? In fact can a civ declare war without sending an army to attack, or is war only 'officially' started the moment a siege begins?
Yeah, being a jerk nullifies your right to siege triggers. The siege triggers are meant to protect forts starting out, not to protect you from the consequences of your actions, he he he.
Your actions can lead to war, not just for yourself, but between the civs. As far as they're concerned, if your force is caught raiding them
(rather than sneaking in and grabbing an artifact without violence), a state of war already exists at that point (the game technically distinguishes between 'skirmishes' and 'war', but it isn't used everywhere yet and we often just jump up to 'war').
So the consequence of your artifact raid might be a dwarven site being attacked elsewhere. I really need to make that outpost liaison rumor screen less crappy so that you can see what you're responsible for (probably using adapted post-raid mission report stuff).
Are the poison vermin one use only wholly consumed in the extraction (requiring recapture or breeding more) or will summary changes to animal-code make vermin on the whole more persistent in the future if they are going to be used in more common commercial use, such as re-milking them for the poison? Such as how mog hoppers have use for making drinks for instance, domesticating them within the dwarven preferences so i can import mog juice ale from the mountainhomes etc.
It's noted that vermin do seem to breed within a certain capacity when they are placed in a 3x3 or 2x2 square for adjacency, so its quite reasonable to use a cave spider silk farm/modified setup and burrowed kennel controls to micro manage a enclosed area. I've made a mint exporting hamsters to the elves before in well decorated cages so it's a piece of cake.
Nothing has changed about this.
Related, is this poisoned weapon stuff going to be accessed via hardcoded behavior, or will there be some way for custom reactions to make use of this?
I've just added poison weapon traps, not poisoning weapons more generally (aside from the code that already existed).
So, what do you think the next release will give to modders?
The animal defs for entities are the biggest thing. Maybe a bit to do with display furniture. Artifacts themselves didn't really change the raw files at all. All the agent/prophet/pilgrim monk stuff piggybacks on existing religious entities and the SCOUT entity role.
Will the unique elf arrows gain any new effects in this or the forseeable roadplan with the ability to apply effects onto it?
Hard to say what we'll get to, but yeah, there was a time long ago when elf arrows in the game turned into giant thorn balls and there was a little pop of blood.
When you were working on the new poisonous animals class, did you put giant desert scorpions back in?
Will kobolds thieves bring their pets with them on raids?
The squeaky wheel doesn't always get the grease!
If a kobold civ's brazenness is high (due to successful thefts), and they'd be bringing a large distraction/escort already, then yeah, now they'll bring a pet for fun (Llurbin the giant cave spider in the test, killer of my yak). But they don't do full scale monster attacks.
Do all sites have animal containment pits/areas toady? Or is that a exclusive feature to the kobold caves
It hasn't changed, so the humans still keep animals in pastures and the muddy areas behind houses in towns. Goblins still have those giant work pits where the troll shearing occurs.
Gonna go ahead and ask a question regarding the new entity pet stuff - will it mean it'd be possible to add sentient beings to always appear with a particular civ? I.e a modded civ always having tigermen citizens in it.
Under the new predefined pet function that now exists, what happens were I to add in an intelligent creature as an environment independent 'pet' of a civilization started by another type of creature. How well would this work as a workaround for the inability to define a multi-species civilization in the raws? Presumably things work generally as they do with trolls at the moment, no historical figures would be automatically generated but those promoted during play would be able to take up positions (though trolls will never because they cannot speak, so not a perfect analogy).
Another question is what happens if I define a creature in an entity file to be the pet *of* itself. Does this cause everything to crash, or do we end up with two populations, one of which is the pet population and the other the citizen population. I ask not merely out of curiosity but because having a second pet population of the main creature sounds like a good way to prevent population replacement of dark fortresses by stolen children.
They wouldn't get citizen status if they come in through an animal def -- they'd still be relegated to a pet status, stuck in a different population structure. Pretty much like trolls, yeah. I don't think a same-race pet pop would cause a crash, due to the different population structure... it would just be weird, kind of like if every instance of a troll you found were named goblin instead, living alongside the civilized ones.
A while ago, fotf reply? Interview? Sorry I forget exactly when, you mentioned that you'd be looking into optimizing sites in adventurer during this release.
Is that still on the schedule? Kobold sites sound like lots of fun, but not if they run at the current speed of some of the bigger dark fortress/city sites.
On my first pass, I tried several 1000+ dark forts without running into issues. I'm going to try again before the release with some newer saves if they are around. Older saves don't apply since they didn't have the tower sprawl, which spread out the pops to decrease the number of units loaded. If sites are okay with ~500 units loaded, they should be fine, but I'm sure there are still bad towers I just need to run into. I didn't have issues in kobold sites.
Are kobolds poison immune?
Since they don't have containers, I imagine it must be great Fun trying to get the poison from spider to trap. Or maybe trained spiders and snakes do it by themselves...?
Nope, they just live in danger with little value for their own lives right now. But they get along with their pet bugs. At least I didn't see any deaths.
When potions are implemented, are there any plans for adding different ways to apply them and other syndrome-causing substances beyond drinking from a container or being struck by a coated weapon?
We have four ways that syndromes can be activated right now, so I imagine ointments/etc. applied to the skin might also be involved. Not sure about something you breathe in (powder? some sort of gas? depends on where item defs are at).
Even if they are not particularly a fixture in normal fortress gameplay, will you be able to coat weapons in Arena mode with a liquid of your choice?
I haven't done anything with that.
1. Will there be a setting for artifact abundance during worldgen?
2. Will there, in the future, exist a need to properly identify an artifact? Right now, everyone is able to immediately recognize an artifact upon seeing it, which usually doesn't make much sense. I'd imagine there'd be several ways to identify an artifact - either someone in your fort has outright seen it before(and is aware of what it is), has heard/read about it somewhere(with varying degrees of certainty), etc. and if you have a suspicion that an item you posses might be an artifact, you could send out a squad of scholars to scour nearby libraries for more info. Even if you know what the artifact is called, you might not know other info, such as origin, magical properties, etc. This could create very interesting situations, for example purchasing a cheap, weird bone crown from a caravan and it turning out to be an ancient artifact that turns the wearer into an extremely powerful lich, causing much fun in the fortress.
3. How much info about the world's creation myth and magic would your average adventurer have access to initially? How about your fort?
1. That didn't come up, no.
2. It's reasonable, yeah. People certainly shouldn't know every artifact off the top of their heads, and non-experts should be able to understand every scholarly tome either. Not sure when we'll get to that sort of thing.
3. Hard to say at this point! Exposition is one of the key problems, and it's exacerbated by the sheer amount of random crap that will occur at some of the settings. The starting paragraphs in both modes are probably the most important spot just to set the stage, along with whatever you'll see during world gen. Ideally we'd be able to drip additional details as needed without you having to read a giant encyclopedia, but it'll be hard to mimic the kind of ongoing active-play exposition you get in more scripted games. On a more general scale, we'd like it to be possible for there to be great mysteries in the world that don't just get dumped on you, and it would be cool to have a setting that had everything hidden from you and you just have to roll with the punches as you get your bearings. But there are difficulties in all of this.
Did you ever find out what happened to the missing monster hunters and their petitions to hunt in your caverns from the last release? Might they finally make an appearance in the upcoming release?
And...
What role will prophets (fake or otherwise) play in fortress mode? Will they preach in the taverns (or temples)? Will dwarves get stressed about the future just listening to them? Will they petition? If so, what as? Entertainers? Something new?
Yeah! I had moved a code block out of a loop to speed things up, but a 'break;' came along for the ride, entirely nullifying monster slayer visitors in the event you had discovered an underground layer. That's fixed now.
Prophets, pilgrims and monks come if you have an aligned temple. But fort mode is pretty boring here, probably because we never got to the whole priest thing more generally (so no petitions available -- has to do with the religious entities being broken up from the site entities, makes it a real pain until we get that resolved in a more focused way w/ religious embark scenario stuff). If you'd have told me ten years ago we'd have assignable fortress temple dancers before we had fortress priests, I'd have been very confused. We were originally hoping to do religious riots and persecution at least for this release, but that was all a tangent so it didn't happen. Still might do a bit of incidentals with it as we're cleaning up false prophets and doing some agent tests at the end here, on to provide something beyond just watching the prophet scream.
I forget how it works exactly, but do kidnapped children retain any of their original entity settings once they reach adulthood, or do they become completely goblin entity members? Specifically I'm thinking about beards. It's all very well goblins sending evil dwarf spies to your fortress with false identities, but lack of beard is going to give them away every time, isn't it?
They might have a few things like their religious beliefs intact, depending on their age when they were taken, but I'm pretty sure they'll screw up hair styles now.
If NPCs ever gain the ability to scrutinize clothing choice, how will they handle a player that develops a preference for clothing or armor that doesn't match up with their natural identity? This could come about via gear stolen from another civ (taken as trophies for example), via reaction mods, or other methods both within and without the vanilla game's abilities.
It's hard to say what we'd get to first -- they can think about other entities, so it might call up their thoughts on the entity in question. Or just that the player is being odd or flamboyant. Or something related to disguises/cirme. Not really sure what angle will appear first, since the customs/status stuff might involve clothing, or it might not.
Does the TS_PREFERRED_SHAPING tag need a certain format besides just trying stuff like BRAIDED or SHAVED or whatnot? I couldn't get it to work with anything but the STANDARD_*_SHAPINGS entries, which brings up another question, are there any plans to move things like styling/jewelry/where jewelry can be equipped out to the raws in the near future?
This isn't something that can be defined with new tokens yet. It only takes NEATLY_COMBED, BRAIDED, DOUBLE_BRAIDS, PONY_TAILS, CLEAN_SHAVEN, STANDARD_HAIR_SHAPINGS, STANDARD_BEARD_SHAPINGS, STANDARD_MOUSTACHE_SHAPINGS, STANDARD_SIDEBURNS_SHAPINGS.
I don't have near future plans to change these things, though yeah, it's lackluster.
Do retired adventurers contribute towards site rumours? For example, if my adventurer has visited or actually started at a fortress with a secret stash of artifacts, or if he's visited other retired adventurers in their own sites and seen their artifacts, is this knowledge recorded and can it then become rumours in the site I retire at? Let's assume I forgot to actively tell everyone about everything I'd seen before retiring.
There are some rumors they have right now, but I don't think it records passive rumors for your adventurers. So you can't say you've seen an artifact in a display case, but you can say you've picked up/dropped something, and I think that you've seen somebody else do it (since those incidents get witness reports). I could be wrong (might get the passives). Retired adventurers can pass on these rumors, but they might need to travel first. I don't think it makes you spill your guts right when you retire.
What made you remove claims for kobolds? Or were they not meant to have them in the first place? Makes sense I suppose. Will there be a way to set 'claims artifacts' races when modding?
With kobolds stealing artifacts and such, how will they react if an artifact is stolen from them? Will they act as if they have an informal, civ or site-level ownership of the artifact by deliberately trying to take it back, or will any re-theft of the artifact be an incidental consequence of kobolds just thieving in general?
Yeah, Knight Otu is correct that we were mainly worried about getting artifacts out of their hands and into the trophy room, but we also don't think of kobolds as personal-property-oriented, generally. I agree a kobold diplomat would be funny, but they'd obviously just be being mischievous and half-oblivious about it. Entities all claim artifacts, unless you specifically turn it off -- it's sort of half-assed now (just a new tag), since property stuff is going to drop a bomb in it two releases down the track anyway.
And yeah, FantasticDorf is right -- any attempt to reclaim the artifact would be an accident.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1444215 times)